


Sweet and Sour

by thelittlestbird



Category: Orange is the New Black
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Ensemble Cast, Explicit Language, Female Character of Color, Female Friendship, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Post S3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 23:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5475053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlestbird/pseuds/thelittlestbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that she's Jewish, what will Cindy do on Christmas?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet and Sour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keerawa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/gifts).



“Hey, Cindy!” Janae slid down the cafeteria bench, pulling her tray of brownish goo – “chicken a la king” brownish goo, as opposed to the almost indistinguishable “beef wellington” brownish goo from yesterday. “I got a question.”

“No, you can’t have none of my broccoli.” Cindy retorted. Taystee and Poussey laughed.

“That ain’t it!” Now that Cindy had mentioned it, though, Janae did cast a slightly longing look at the crisp green vegetables on Cindy’s triple-wrapped kosher-meal tray. “I wanna know what y’all do for Christmas.”

Cindy shrugged. “When I was real little my daddy’d make us go to church all day. Things got better after he skipped out – sometimes we’d go visit my grandma in St. Louis. Christmas at her place was real nice - ”

Janae cut her off. “No! I mean, what do _y’all_ do for Christmas. Jewish folks.”

“Huh,” said Taystee. “I never thought about that before.”

“Neither did I,” said Janae. “But now I did. So I wanna know.”

Cindy had been thinking about it too. She’d been thinking about it for weeks, actually. Before this year, she’d thought that Chanukah was what Jewish people did on Christmas. She’d been surprised to learn that the two holidays were entirely separate, and didn’t even always happen at the same time. Like this year, in fact, when Chanukah had started around Thanksgiving, and was over long before Christmas.

She’d liked Chanukah more than she thought she would. She had thought she’d get bored with it after a couple days – really, a holiday for _eight days_? Who can stay interested in a holiday for that long? But Cindy had found herself loving the repeated ritual, the little reminder every night to pause and think about God. The holiday kept hanging on just like the Maccabees had, she thought. She and Ginsberg had assembled a menorah out of some fake candles with little electric bulbs, and said the blessings every night after dinner. Turning on a wavery electric bulb wasn’t the same as lighting a candle, but every night, the light still grew a bit brighter.

Now Chanukah was over, though, and Christmas was almost here, and Cindy didn’t know what she was supposed to do, and she hadn’t asked Ginsberg, either. After all the questions she’d asked Ginsberg over the last year – about Heaven and Hell, about God, about shrimp – _this_ was the one she held back on?

But every time she intended to bring it up, Cindy would remember those Christmases with her grandmother – the smell of the baked ham, the riot of cousins crammed into Grandma’s tiny shabby apartment. The little stocking with her name hand-sewn on it: the first thing that she could remember someone _making_ for her. She remembered the look on Grandma’s face when she gave it to Cindy, and remembered how, for a second, she felt like she was the most important person in the world for Grandma.

She remembered all of that, and her mouth stayed shut, as if asking the question would let all of those memories out into the air and make them disappear.

Now that Janae was asking, though, Cindy couldn’t not answer, even if she didn’t know what the answer was. “Oh, I know what we do,” Cindy said airily. “But Ginsberg’ll explain it better.”

They all trooped over to where Ginsberg and Boyle were sitting with a few of the other white women, crowding around the table in a knot so eager that it made the guards at the edge of the room go on higher alert. 

“Well…nothing, really,” Ginsberg said, a bit anticlimactically, when they posed the question again. 

“You don’t do _nothing_?” Cindy gasped in shock. “I mean, _we_ don’t do nothing?”

Ginsberg shook her head. “It’s not a holiday for us. I mean, you never did anything on Rosh Hashanah before this year, right?” 

“Right…” Cindy said slowly, still looking unsettled.

“It’s just another day.” Ginsberg shrugged. “But because everyone else is busy doing other things and everything is closed, it’s really quiet. So usually we go to the movies,” Ginsberg replied. “And then out for Chinese food.”

“For real?” Taystee asked, fascinated. “Chinese food? Like in that movie with the kid with the BB gun?”

“It’s the only place that’s open.” Ginsberg’s voice was turning a little wistful. “China Palace. That’s where we went when I was a kid. Just about every other Jewish family in town would be there, and it always turned into this big party, with everyone talking to each other and going from table to table catching up with their friends.” 

Poussey smiled. “That sounds nice.” 

“It was,” said Ginsberg, smiling sadly back.

“Chinese food, huh?” Cindy broke in. She glanced at the other women surrounding her, watching them watch her figure out what she was supposed to do: Taystee with curiosity, Janae with skepticism, Poussey with sincere thoughtfulness. And then back to Ginsberg, with that sad look in her eyes. “Then we’re gonna do this right! We’re gonna get us some Chinese food.”

* * *

“Next!” Chang blared, as Suzanne went away from the commissary with her arms piled high with Fritos and pencil sharpeners.

Cindy ducked down to peer through the tiny cage that separated Chang from the rest of the world. “Hey, Chang! How do you make Chinese food?”

Chang ignored the question. “You buying something?”

“I said, how do you make Chinese food? General Tso? Those little chicken wings?”

“That not real Chinese food.” Chang said flatly. “I not help you.”

“C’mon, Chang!” Cindy wheedled. “If it ain’t real, then help me make it real. It’s for religious reasons!”

“They got a religion about Chinese food now?” Boo scoffed from her place in the commissary line. “I thought that they couldn’t get any crazier than that religion about Norma’s toast, but I guess I was wrong.”

“It was never about the toast!” Leanne protested next to her. “It was about what the toast _meant_.”

Chang shook her head. “I not help you,” she repeated in exactly the same tone as before. “You not buy something? You go away now.”

Even Cindy knew better than to try to break through the brick wall that was Chang. “Fuck that,” she grumbled, storming away.

* * *

“This is not my food,” Red said to Cindy as she hefted a squashy plastic bag of pale brown goo over a metal pan. “Chicken cacciatore,” read the computer-printed label stuck to the side of the bag.

“That ain’t what I’m here to ask about,” Cindy said. “Can you cook me and Ginsberg some Chinese food?”

Brown globs slid out of the bag into the tray. Red didn’t need to watch; she could look up at Cindy with narrowed skeptical eyes. “Why?”

“Because it’s Christmas. And you got your garden and shit. You can do it, right? I’ll get you something in return.”

“First of all,” Red said, her expression hardening, “I did not think you would be looking for Christmas presents this year.” 

Cindy felt a little twinge at that, thinking of her little stocking at Grandma’s. She covered it up with an indignant, “Hey!”

“Second,” Red continued, “I don’t take custom orders. And third, my ‘garden and shit,’ as you so eloquently put it, is _closed_. If you haven’t already noticed, it is _winter_. That is when things do not grow.”

Cindy changed tactics. “Awww, Red!” she said in her best pleading voice. “You can cook with anything. You’re that good – I know you are!”

“I have no garden. I have no real ingredients.” Another wave of brown chunks splopped into the tray. “Do you expect me to catch The Chicken and cook it, perhaps?”

“That chicken ain’t real,” Cindy scoffed.

“Exactly!” Red snapped. “Now go away and let me work!”

* * *

“Hey, Cindy!” Poussey squeezed along the line of impatient towel-clad women on her way out of the bathroom. “You still gonna have Chinese food for Christmas?”

Cindy rolled her eyes. “I’m gonna _try_. Looks like there ain’t no way to get that shit around here.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I remembered something from a couple years ago,” Poussey continued, letting the storm of Cindy’s outburst blow past her. “There was this white chick who was really good at cooking – you know, putting things together from the commissary? She did this sweet-and-sour pork.”

“Pork!” Cindy’s hand reached out to smack Poussey, but she caught herself just in time and just grabbed at her own hair in frustration instead. “What part of _Jewish_ don’t you understand, bitch? We ain’t doing no _pork_!” Not Grandma’s Christmas ham, not sweet-and-sour pork, nothing.

Poussey looked as if she were already regretting trying to help. “Yeah, I _know_ that. You can use the same recipe, just with something besides pork.”

Cindy subsided enough to say, “Okay. Fine. What’s in it?”

“You need grape jelly and lemon Kool-Aid powder for the sweet-and-sour part,” Poussey began. “And ramen, with the extra spicy chili flavor pack. And then something to take the place of the pork.” She looked up at the ceiling, as if the answers were written there. “Maybe Fritos? If you crush ‘em up and make ‘em into little balls, and then put sauce on ‘em.”

Cindy didn’t want to admit that Poussey’s recipe sounded like it might work. She still had angry energy in her after the last few days of having all of her requests denied, and after having to push down yet another memory of her grandma’s Christmas. But she knew that Poussey’s idea _was_ good, and she’d been working hard on forgiveness since Yom Kippur. So she said, “Okay. Yeah. That…could work.” And then, a beat later, “Thanks.”

* * *

Surprisingly, the ramen was the easiest ingredient to get. 

It just took a few days of wearing panties and a couple minutes of bargaining with Chapman. “Come _on_!” Cindy pleaded, then groaned, then shouted. 

“I don’t know, Cindy,” Piper said, in a tone of regret that was too elaborate to be genuine. “I’m running pretty low on the extra-spicy flavor packs.”

“Bullshit!” Cindy fired back. “I did my part to get this! I did _all_ my parts to get this,” she added with a snicker and a wiggle of her hips. “Now you gotta do yours. I know you got ‘em! You ain’t running that low. You’re just trying to get me to give up, or to offer you something else.” She waved the pink lacy panties menacingly in Chapman’s face.

Piper rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Fine. You can have it. But this is the last extra-spicy pack that you can have.”

Cindy didn’t care about any extra-spicy packs besides this one. She snapped it out of Chapman’s hand and ran.

* * *

The grape jelly was a little harder. 

Cindy hadn’t stolen anything in months, not since she had started caring what God thought. Not because she thought God would strike her down – she’d long since given up on her daddy’s idea of a God who would do that – but because she knew that God had higher expectations of her, and she wanted to live up to those expectations.

So she was out of practice, and feared that she might have lost her groove. It took her three breakfasts to work up the nerve to even try.

But when the time came, the little jelly packets slid up her sleeve just as smoothly as they always had, and she remembered just how to walk so that none of the guards would suspect that she had taken a little something extra.

It worried her, how easy it was to steal again. 

 

* * *

Two days before Christmas, Cindy had almost everything she needed.

“Gimme two things of lemonade Kool-Aid and two bags of Fritos,” Cindy said to Chang at the commissary window.

Chang stared back. “You no like lemon.”

“Yeah, but I want it.”

“Fine.” Chang slapped the two little foil packets on the counter. “You want something you no like, I don’t care.”

“What about the Fritos?”

“No Fritos.”

“What, you decided I don’t like those either? I like Fritos, I want Fritos, and I got the money in my commissary to pay for Fritos, so you better give me the damn Fritos!”

“No Fritos,” Chang repeated flatly. “I no have.”

Then Cindy remembered what she’d seen at the commissary a couple days earlier: Suzanne, carrying piles and piles of Fritos. “Aww, shit. Did Crazy Eyes buy ‘em all?” she groaned.

“Next!” Chang shouted.

 

* * *  
“Yo, Cr – Suzanne!” Cindy corrected herself hastily. She was trying to get something out of Crazy Eyes, after all. And Taystee was trying to get them all to use Suzanne’s real name, to be more respectful.

Suzanne was curled up in the corner of her bed, arms and legs twisted around each other as she stared at a magazine. Her head bounced up at the sound of her name.

“You got any of those Fritos left?”

Suzanne considered this question for a very long time. “Why?” she finally asked. “Are you asking because you want to know if I have them? Or are you asking because you want to get some of them for yourself?”

“Because I want them,” Cindy replied. “Gimme some.” It was worth a try, at least.

“No!” Suzanne shouted, as she unfolded like a jack-in-the-box. And then, quieter, “No. I don’t _give_ things away. Not anymore. I shouldn’t do that. Shouldn’t let people take advantage of me. But I’ll trade.” She cocked her head. “Out of curiosity, what do you want them for?”

Cindy didn’t see any harm in telling her. “I’m making Chinese food for Christmas. For Ginsberg. ‘Cause that’s what us Jews do.”

“That’s a strange thing to do on Christmas,” Suzanne said, regarding Cindy with an unblinking gaze.

“Maybe, but it’s what _we_ do. Ain’t your family do weird shit at Christmas? Everybody’s family does weird shit at Christmas.” Cindy thought of the cousin who insisted on applauding after every present was opened, and the aunt who brought scented candles ‘so it can smell like Christmas,’ and the games that Cindy and her mother only ever played in the car on the long rides to and from St. Louis. She swallowed hard against the memories and pushed on: “Anyway, we gotta have Chinese food. And we need Fritos to make, like, these little meatball things.”

Suzanne finally blinked. “Oh.” She thought about this, hard. “But I like Fritos.”

“Yeah, well, I _need_ the Fritos!” Cindy countered. “Come _on_. I gotta have ‘em. For Christmas!” Her voice was starting to rise. “Gimme the damn Fritos!” Her voice rose sharply, and then cracked into something close to a sob. Oh, hell, she was _not_ going to let Suzanne see her cry! She buried her face in her hands.

“Whoa!” Suzanne jumped back, eyes going wide and arms and legs flailing out in surprise. And then, slowly, she softened, easing back towards Cindy to start patting her awkwardly on the back. “Hey. Hey. It’s okay.”

“It ain’t okay!” Cindy tried desperately hard to keep her voice steady. “I miss my grandma and it ain’t Christmas and it ain’t okay.”

Grandma had cried when she heard that Cindy had been arrested. That’s what Cindy’s mother had said. It broke Grandma’s heart. _Cindy_ had done that, and that felt worse than a hundred arrests.

“Yeah, I know.” Suzanne’s voice was gentler than Cindy had ever heard it before. “It’s never really okay in here. It feels like an alternate dimension. Not one of the evil mirror-universe ones, because it’s easy to tell when you’re in one of those, but one of the subtler ones, where you’re already living there for a few weeks before you realize that gravity works differently or you’re actually on the back of a giant turtle.”

When you listened to Suzanne long enough, Cindy thought, she almost started to make sense. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s why my grandma ain’t visited,” she said with a bitter laugh half-muffled by her hands, “‘cause she’s stuck in another dimension.” St. Louis might as well be another dimension, for how far it was away from Litchfield. Even if Grandma had wanted to come. Maybe she did want to talk to her, now – her mother had said that Grandma was happy that Cindy had found God. 

She hoped so. Hoped it more than anything else. Even more than she hoped that the sweet-and-sour would come out right.

“I miss my Nana too,” Suzanne confided in a whisper. “Usually I miss Mommy more, but Mommy comes to visit sometimes, and Nana never can.”

“Yeah,” Cindy agreed. And that was all she could say without risking crying again. She felt the bed creak as Suzanne got up, patted her on the shoulder one last time, and walked away.

When Cindy finally felt in control enough to lift her head and open her eyes, she saw three bags of Fritos on the bed next to her.

* * *

On Christmas Day, just before lunch, Cindy and Ginsberg huddled around the microwave, watching the little tray spin around and around.

“You actually made Chinese food?” Ginsberg’s wondering smile glowed in the dim light shining out of the microwave window. “You made this for me?”

“I did!” Cindy preened. “That’s what we gotta have on Christmas, right?” The microwave pinged, and Cindy gingerly pulled out the two little bowls of purplish-brownish noodles and passed one to Ginsberg.

For a long long moment, they both chewed silently, contemplating.

Finally, Cindy spoke: “Man, this shit is _nasty_.”

Ginsberg erupted into relieved laughter. “Oh, thank God. I didn’t want to be the first one to say it. Not after you worked so hard!”

“Whoever Poussey got this recipe from, they must’ve never ate Chinese food in their life! Or had no taste buds.”

They collapsed on the hard plastic chairs, laughing so hard that they almost spilled their sweet-and-sour Frito balls.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ginsberg finally said, wiping tears from her eyes. “It’s not about the food, it’s about doing something special.”

“Damn right!” Cindy agreed. “Ain’t nobody else in Litchfield doing this.”

“I’m glad, because I wouldn’t wish this sauce on anyone!” Ginsberg laughed. Then she added, smile fading into something more serious, “Thank you. Really. For trying to make Chinese food, and for trying to make today special. I didn’t want to ask, but I was worried that Christmas might be hard for you this year.”

Cindy tried to shrug it off with a noncommittal, “Hey.” But that wasn’t enough, not to really answer Ginsberg, and not for herself either. So she went on, “Yeah. It’s been…hard. But it’s good to have something else to do, you know?”

“And you’re okay?” Ginsberg asked, still concerned.

Cindy thought hard – the way she did during their lessons, trying to make sure that what she was saying to Ginsberg was what she actually meant. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I am. Like you always say, we’re supposed to think about what we’re doing that’s different from everyone else, and why we’re doing it, right? Well, I’m doing this because _I’m_ different now.” 

Ginsberg smiled. “Good,” she declared. 

Cindy paused for another moment and took a long deep breath before saying, “So, since we ain’t gonna be eating…I think I’m gonna go call my grandma.” As soon as the words were out, she knew it was the right decision: she could feel herself growing lighter. “I ain’t talked to her for a long time.”

They walked down the hall together towards the phones, quiet amid the echoes of distant shouts from the rest of Litchfield, building their own traditions in the middle of a chaotic world.

**Author's Note:**

> The minute I saw the prompt about Cindy’s first Christmas as a Jew, I knew I had to write it, especially since it was for a pinch-hitter. Thank you for pinch-hitting! I hope I’ve helped make your Yuletide a bit happier. And I hope I’ve done justice to “Suzanne being awesome” as well – she’s one of my favorite characters, too.
> 
> This scene should technically be taking place in the middle of Season 4, but since I’m writing it in the break between Season 3 and Season 4, I wasn’t able to take into account any of the changes implied by the last episode of Season 3 (what happened to Alex, the presence of Judy King, the effect of the new arrivals, etc.). In keeping with the show’s timeline, I’ve set this story in December 2013; that year, Chanukah started on November 27.
> 
> The prison-cuisine sweet-and-sour pork recipe is from [ this article](http://www.vice.com/read/the-art-of-gourmet-cooking-in-prison-511).
> 
> Thanks also to the keepers of the [Orange is the New Black Wiki](http://orange-is-the-new-black.wikia.com/), whose attention to detail was immensely helpful throughout the writing process.


End file.
